The PM doesn’t know me
20/08/2006
I’m watching the Prime Minister’s National Day Rally right now, but I can hardly go on. It pains my heart.
It started off fine. I think the country is small enough for this almost like an all-hands style of a State of the Union. It’s less about proposals, but more like what we’ve achieved, and what the direction for the year and the decade should be. It’s a pep-talk too, but that’s cool. Once a year, after slogging at it, some perspective, and a little pat on the back is always welcome, right.
The PM dedicated a part of his speech to address the opportunities and challenges in the digital age. First he mentions Straits Times Interactive, and Channelnewsasia. Well, ok. He’s talking about all those Green Card lottery ads, and mentions how he sees them all over ST Interactive and CNA.com. He says the newly formed Citizenship and Population Unit (CPU, wahhh so high tech!) should be using those ad units to advertise immigration lotteries or opportunities to Singapore. It’s a great idea. Just a small suggestion to the civil servant tasked to do this: you want to be advertising on websites that target users outside of Singapore, so maybe ST Interactive and CNA.com should be lower on your priority list, even though the PM mentioned it. Please spend your money on Yahoo!, because at least they have a breadth of products in a host of countries. So you can target your efforts more effectively. Advertising on ST Interactive and CNA.com won’t give you jack, honestly. But I digress.
PM Lee then mentioned MSN Messenger, Google, and Skype. After which I stopped paying attention, and had a piece of chocolate.
Damn, it hurt more than I expect, hearing people use MSN, Google and Skype as verbs. Even more so when it’s at a stage such as this.
Are we missing something – is corporate branding at an all time low? Ugh!!!!
This smarts, getting beaten, so to speak, by less. We have to so kick ass next year.
